In Tech News
I got an e-mail supposedly from ‘Google+ All Domain Mail Team’ at postmaster @ googleplus.com.us telling me to sign in to my e-mail account using the link they provide. The thing is, their link goes to www.lllearners.com; I have no connection to Google+; and I don’t do webmail.
One of the lamest phishing expeditions ever.
The BBC reports that the US Postal Service employee information was hacked. The only non-employees who might affected are those who use the USPS call center, rather than the ‘Net site or local post offices.
Finally they provide some coverage of Joan Clarke, woman who cracked Enigma with Alan Turing. She was one of several women who worked on the project that are almost unknown to the world. Some of her story is told in a new film that was just released.
6 comments
I’d never heard of Joan Clarke. thank you for that!
If you read the histories, there were no women involved in science and technology, other than Marie Curie between Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. It’s absurd.
Yeah. I covered several women who should have been recognised but were not, simply because of their gender. Another was Dr Rosalind Franklin. She took the photograph that led to the discovery of the DNA double helix. But all recognition went to male colleagues Watson and Crick. When she graduated from Cambridge women weren’t recognised as having achieved a BA or MA.
Lise Meitner. She was born in Vienna in 1878. She was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission in 1938. Element 109 was named after her.
And not just women, if you were black, you were also ignored. Such as:
Thomas Jennings (1791 – 1859) On March 3, 1821, Thomas Jennings became the first African American to receive a patent. As the owner of a New York dry-cleaning business, Jennings invented and patented a new process for cleaning clothing. Jennings used the money he earned with his invention to buy his family out of slavery. Active as an abolitionist, Jennings published petitions that advocated the end of slavery in New York.
Vivien T. Thomas. In 1944, Hopkins’ surgery chief, Alfred Blalock, successfully operated on the heart of a 9-pound child, a “blue baby.” Medical experts believed cardiac surgery was impossible. As Blalock prepared to make his historic incision, he looked around the operating room and asked, “Where’s Vivien?” Blalock would not begin until Thomas, stationed on a stool behind his right shoulder, was there to guide Blalock through procedures. Prejudice long kept Thomas’ crucial role unacknowledged.
Major Robert H. Lawrence, the unsung astronaut – America’s first black astronaut and why his sacrifice in a tragic accident just six months before his first trip to space took so long to be remembered and honored.
The Unsung Astronaut
There are of course several others. Humans are such a wonderful species, right?
It was even worse when the only people who could write were members of the Church. History was ‘edited’ to include only a limited subset of the people who were actually alive and doing interesting things according to the views of Church officials.
Sojouner Truth was accused of being a man because she spoke so effectively. She opened her blouse on stage to prove the heckler wrong, but at the time women, and especially black women, were not considered capable of much outside of housekeeping and having children. That view was evident well into the 20th century, and hasn’t entirely disappeared.
The guy who is one of the hosts on Australia’s Today TV show made a major point when he wore the same suit every day for a year, and no one noticed. If a woman had worn the same clothes twice in a month there would be a media storm.
That’s true Bryan. Sadly, too many people believe written history is honestly representative of the actual facts. It rarely is.
Here’s a few more:
Mary Sherman Morgan was America’s first female rocket scientist and she invented the liquid fuel Hydyne in 1957, which powered the Jupiter-C rocket that boosted the United States’ first satellite, Explorer 1.
Dr. Ernest Everett Just (August 14, 1883 – October 27, 1941) was a pioneering African American biologist, academic and science writer. Just’s primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. Dr. Just was a true scholar. He sought to find “truth” using scientific methods and inquiry; was bold enough to challenge the theories of leading biologists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Dr. Just was passionately driven to understand the world of the cell. His tenacity and motivation led him to add to our understanding of the process of artificial parthenogenesis and the physiology of cell development.
Dr. Saint Elmo Brady (1884 -1966) First African American to obtain a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in the United States, which he earned in 1916 from the University of Illinois. He taught at Tuskegee, Fisk, Howard and Tougaloo, and was the first African American admitted to Phi Lambda Upsilon, the chemistry honor society.
What amuses me the most is that the ‘flat earthers’ who believe in creationism (which is merely opinion dressed to look like fact), do so simply because if they believed in evolution (which is fact), then they would have to acknowledge they and all humans are descended from black Africans.
As soon as I hear someone disparage dark skinned people, I tell them they have the same black genes and that in fact, millennia ago, their pale white skin would have been considered a rare aberration and they wouldn’t have lived long in the harsh African climate. It’s too bad nature evolved the Caucasoid or Europid genes when the African’s migrated to cooler climates.
As far as I am concerned, all whiteys who deny science and evolution do so simply because they are bigots at the very least. It has nothing to do with religion, that’s simply a convenient excuse. They also morons, of course.
It’s part of the 97% of our genes that we share with chimpanzees, who are nasty buggers as adults. The reduction in melanin was necessary to receive sufficient Vitamin D from a weaker Sun. Most of the other changes were a reaction to different diets, both in the eating and the collection of food.
There was a lot of bogus Slavic ‘history’ created during the 19th century because the Tsar of Russia paid to have it written according to his specifications. It was always easier to get paid for writing to the stereotypes of the people in power. People like to see their prejudices justified in print.